Tag Archives: green fuels

Cleaner greener diesel by way of bi-functional nanoparticles

Leave a reply

It’s always good to hear about cleaner greener diesel as per this May 13, 2014 news item on Azonano,

Ames Laboratory [US Dept. of Energy] scientists have developed a nanoparticle that is able to perform two processing functions at once for the production of green diesel, an alternative fuel created from the hydrogenation of oils from renewable feedstocks like algae.

The method is a departure from the established process of producing biodiesel, which is accomplished by reacting fats and oils with alcohols.

A May ??, 2014 Ames Laboratory news release,which originated the news item, describes the specifics of the problem the scientists are trying to solve,

“Conventionally, when you are producing biodiesel from a feedstock that is rich in free fatty acids like microalgae oil, you must first separate the fatty acids that can ruin the effectiveness of the catalyst, and then you can perform the catalytic reactions that produce the fuel,” said Ames Lab scientist Igor Slowing. “By designing multifunctional nanoparticles and focusing on green diesel rather than biodiesel, we can combine multiple processes into one that is faster and cleaner.” Contrary to biodiesel, green diesel is produced by hydrogenation of fats and oils, and its chemical composition is very similar to that of petroleum-based diesel. Green diesel has many advantages over biodiesel, like being more stable and having a higher energy density.

One of the research groups at Ames Laboratory stumbled across an exciting property while working with bi-functional nanoparticles (from the news release),

An Ames Lab research group, which included Slowing, Kapil Kandel, Conerd Frederickson, Erica A. Smith, and Young-Jin Lee, first saw success using bi-functionalized mesostructured nanoparticles. These ordered porous particles contain amine groups that capture free fatty acids and nickel nanoparticles that catalyze the conversion of the acids into green diesel. Nickel has been researched widely in the scientific community because it is approximately 2000 times less expensive as an alternative to noble metals traditionally used in fatty acid hydrogenation, like platinum or palladium.

Creating a bi-functional nanoparticle also improved the resulting green diesel. Using nickel for the fuel conversion alone, the process resulted in too strong of a reaction, with hydrocarbon chains that had broken down. The process, called “cracking,” created a product that held less potential as a fuel.

“A very interesting thing happened when we added the component responsible for the sequestration of the fatty acids,” said Slowing. “We no longer saw the cracking of molecules. So the result is a better catalyst that produces a hydrocarbon that looks much more like diesel. “

“It also leaves the other components of the oil behind, valuable molecules that have potential uses for the pharmaceutical and food industries,” said Slowing.

But Slowing, along with Kapil Kandel, James W. Anderegg, Nicholas C. Nelson, and Umesh Chaudhary, took the process further by using iron as the catalyst. Iron is 100 times cheaper than nickel. Using iron improved the end product even further, giving a faster conversion and also reducing the loss of CO2  in the process.

“As part of the mission of the DOE, [US Dept. of Energy] we are focused on researching the fundamental science necessary to create the process; but the resulting technology should in principle be scalable for industry,” he said.

Here”s a link to and a citation for the published research paper,

Supported iron nanoparticles for the hydrodeoxygenation of microalgal oil to green diesel by Kapil Kandel, James W. Anderegg, Nicholas C. Nelson, Umesh Chaudhary, Igor I. Slowing. Journal of Catalysis Volume 314, May 2014, Pages 142–148 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jcat.2014.04.009

This paper is behind a paywall.

There is a patent pending on this technology (from the news release),

A patent application has been filed for this technology; it is available for licensing from the Iowa State University Research Foundation. Further information can be obtained at licensing@iastate.edu.

Patent or not, it would be nice to see at least one of these technologies successfully commercialized.

Butterflies give and give; this time they inspire more green fuel production

1 Reply

Butterflies are proving to be quite generous as they inspire ideas for greater production of green fuels in addition to everything else they’ve inspired. From the March 26, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

“We were searching the ‘art of blackness’ for the secret of how those black wings [from black butterflies] absorb so much sunlight and reflect so little,” Fan [Tongxiang Fan, Ph.D] explained.…

Fan’s team observed elongated rectangular scales arranged like overlapping shingles on the roof of a house. The butterflies they examined had slightly different scales, but both had ridges running the length of the scale with very small holes on either side that opened up onto an underlying layer.

The steep walls of the ridges help funnel light into the holes, Fan explained. The walls absorb longer wavelengths of light while allowing shorter wavelengths to reach a membrane below the scales. Using the images of the scales, the researchers created computer models to confirm this filtering effect. The nano-hole arrays change from wave guides for short wavelengths to barriers and absorbers for longer wavelengths, which act just like a high-pass filtering layer.

The group used actual butterfly-wing structures to collect sunlight, employing them as templates to synthesize solar-collecting materials. They chose the black wings of the Asian butterfly Papilio helenus Linnaeus, or Red Helen, and transformed them to titanium dioxide by a process known as dip-calcining. Titanium dioxide is used as a catalyst to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. Fan’s group paired this butterfly-wing patterned titanium dioxide with platinum nanoparticles to increase its water-splitting power. The butterfly-wing compound catalyst produced hydrogen gas from water at more than twice the rate of the unstructured compound catalyst on its own.

This work was presented at the American Chemical Society’s 243rd annual meeting themed Chemistry of Life  in San Diego, California, March 25-29, 2012.

As I’ve noted previously, although that was specific to Morpho butterflies (my Feb. 14, 2012 posting), butterflies are being very generous with their intellectual property.